Branch Exit – Weekend – Kommersant
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Again, something is wrong in the National Royal Hospital of Copenhagen – a month before Christmas, the online cinema Mubi releases the continuation (after 25 years) of the famous mystical series by Lars von Trier “Kingdom”. Five new episodes are called Exodus, and they tell how the world plunges into hell, while the employees of a famous clinic are doing God knows what. Perhaps this is the most comfortable apocalypse that modernity can offer us.
Lonely pensioner Karen (Bodil Jorgenson), the same Karen who suffered from Lars von Trier in “Idiots”, watches the eighth episode of “Kingdom” before going to bed and, not satisfied with the ernistic finale (of course, it is difficult to be satisfied when the narrative ends on a cliffhanger, and no continuation), writes out important names from the film in a notebook: fru Drusse, Bulder, Little Brother, Mosgard … And goes to the National Royal Hospital, which, despite the artistic exercises of the Danish director, continues its work in Copenhagen.
The slight problem is that Karen seems to be knocking on the hospital door in her sleep – she’s a sleepwalker – so you can’t be sure if she’s dreaming up the contents of the new season of Kingdom. Maybe it’s a fantasy inspired by watching an old movie? Here is the picture, as soon as Karen crosses the threshold of the hospital, it shrinks and fades – degrading from the fashionable, ultra-clear widescreen format familiar to the modern TV viewer into the yellowed grainy frame of that painfully familiar “Kingdom” from the mid-1990s, when Trier was seriously carried away by inexpensive digital cameras and rocked everyone with “dogma”.
The new “Kingdom” begins with a joke. Karen asks at the reception how Mrs. Drusse, an important patient from neurology, is doing, and receives a rebuke: they say, for a long time we have not had fans of this fool Trier here! Have you watched it on CD yet? Further, more: Swedish surgeon Helmer, son of the same Dr. Stig Helmer who was driven mad by Danish healthcare, collects IKEA furniture for his office and fights for a parking space, while the neurology department goes crazy over his gender-neutral patient rules (cards of patients are immediately mixed up), and the dish washer conducts mysterious conversations with the robot.
Trier, as usual, walks along the edge. It becomes especially alarming when the Swedes and Danes suddenly begin to sort things out: who was a vassal of whom and when? The brutal fratricidal Scandinavian war is about to begin on the territory of the hospital. However, despite this feverish modernity of Exodus (such is the subtitle of the third part of Kingdom), the new history is a reassuringly traditional spectacle. If there were a competition to stage the solemn ceremony of the apocalypse, Trier would certainly win it. Because it’s cozy.
The new episodes end-to-end, almost without gaps, adjoin the previous two seasons, as if there was no break in 25 years (the first episode of the third season is numbered “nine”). Whether you like it or not, you will remember Alexander Blok: “Live at least another quarter of a century – / Everything will be like this. There is no exit.” There is no way out for Trier, who once started with his friends-mockingbirds Niels Wursel and Morten Arnfred to surprise the public with the Danish version of Twin Peaks, to shoot such a senile-mystical detective story to make the devil feel sick. It was once supposed that this soap opera (as critics wrote, “an ambulance on acid”) would go on the air around Christmas almost every year, but by the third season the design could not stand it – Ernst-Hugo Jaregard, who played the role of Dr. Helmer, died , and in general, somehow, apparently, a joke has become boring. Decades later, it turned out that with the detailed preservation of other surroundings, new people can easily be launched into the existing structure – and everything will repeat itself, as of old. Laundresses in the swamp cellars will continue to bleach their linen, they will wash dishes in the dining room, and there will be a scientific conference on pain in the lecture hall; and while cracks crawl straight out of hell along the concrete structures of a brutal building, and electric cones of Christmas trees shine like devilish horns on the roof, you can have plenty of frolic, quoting your favorite Bergman, Dreyer and Tarkovsky, parodying Michelangelo’s frescoes, turning on “Tristan and Isolde” on occasion Wagner or Handel’s Sarabande. In general, get ready for a meeting with both the divine and the diabolical – this is what the laughing author of the “Kingdom” said at the end of each new series many years ago.
Lars von Trier says something similar even now, but having already fenced himself off from the audience with a burgundy curtain, his eyes would not have seen us! The position of the director is not the easiest. During filming, one of the main authors of our time was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, but he copes with his task no worse than David Lynch, who extended Twin Peaks (something tells you that the competitive factor cannot be denied here). Trier is not going to give up – this is evidenced by the final shots of Exodus, in which a member of the European Film Academy still visits actors, spectators and critics, descending from the sky in a helicopter shining with hellish flames. “Welcome, oh lord, to Babylon!” Willem Dafoe greets him in pure Latin. Apparently, he flew to us from the planet of happiness.
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